skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For what it's worth, I'd never (so far as I can remember) known the four states in MESI cache coherence, but worked out roughly what they had to be; when I checked after submitting my answers, it turned out I was right. And I've no idea whether anyone's ever told me an algorithm for checking whether a graph is bipartite, but I worked one out.

On the other hand, I know nothing about pthreads, made a handwavy guess about that question, and got it very wrong. The underlying failure was a bad guess about the semantics of condition variables. I could whinge about that, but I bet that if I spent more of my life writing multithreaded software -- which is, make no mistake about it, an important skill -- then I wouldn't have made that wrong guess even if I'd still never used pthreads. My answer might still have begun "I've never used pthreads, but ..." but that would have been followed by a better guess than it actually was.

Something may look like a trivia question but give much more information than just "does this person have the information stored in their brain right now?". In this particular case, Colin could (if he chose; he probably has better things to do than go into such detail on the hundreds of responses he's getting) guess that I haven't written much multithreaded software, don't spend a lot of time optimizing things for the memory subsystem but have a good grasp of principles, and am good with algorithms. Not so bad for three trivia questions.

And, whatever cperciva's failings (which may for all I know be many and serious) one thing he certainly isn't is a "B-player". (But then, in my experience talking about "B-players" is itself a bad sign.)
Canadian here. My country is listed higher than the US in both lists, but I have to laugh out loud at that. Canada is swimming in protectionist laws that choke off competition in some vital sectors, like telecom. Even Amazon got crap for wanting to open warehouses here, because it was considered too "threatening" (as in, people might shop there) to the protected, Canadian companies. Canadians routinely cross the border to shop in US towns that are close to the border, because we don't get gouged as much there, and the choices are far better than we get here.
I like http://beanstalkapp.com/ myself, pretty comparable to BitBucket.
That was completely uncalled for. Even if the market is flooded with todo apps, it doesn't mean there is no room for innovation and it doesn't mean that a new todo app can't pull in some solid revenue.
$0.07 / GB was calculated from costs and covers all expenses for an offsite backup service like this. I'm an open book and the project is open-source, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask. :)
Since you're calling it a startup as opposed to just a project, I have to ask about business model. How will you make money off this?

I think you'll have a very, very difficult time monetizing this, as there are already dozens and dozens of free TODO apps. Unless you can carve out a die-hard niche that is 100% against signup and login forms, it will be difficult to compete with the others that are both free and easy to use.
> Interesting, you state that so.. assertively :p

Well, you probably guessed where I came from: http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/

I think most physicists agree that at the bottom, we have a distribution of "complex amplitude"[1] over a "configuration space"[2]. But as you can see from my second link, many (most?) physicists insist that we can derive a "probability" from a complex number. Note that such probability would then be an actual real world probability, where the universe itself is uncertain about what to do. True non-determinism.

It's only natural. At the experimental level, the researcher does observe Born statistics. Same setup, different results, so there is probability in the territory after all.

There's a problem with that however: The equations, which make such wonderfully accurate predictions, (i) are dederministic, and (ii) do not state at any point that the blob of amplitude we don't see disappear in a puff of smoke. They merely say that the blobs eventually stop interacting. The same way that if you launch a photon to outer space, never to meet it again, it won't disappear the instant it reaches the boundary of our observable universe. If you insist on a mono world, you have to assert that the other blob, despite being predicted by those otherwise accurate equations, somehow doesn't exist when you don't see it.

One way to do it is to believe that, contrary to what the equations say, the blob you don't see does disappear in a puff of smoke. Its amplitudes are literally zeroed out behind your back. In hindsight, this one looks nuts to me. I mean, how can we justify distrusting accurate equations in a way that doesn't even make experimental predictions?

Another way is to call the square moduli of those amplitude "probabilities", and pretend that because it's probabilities, the blob you are not in isn't real. But the equations do not make any difference between the two blobs. Then how come the other blob is less real than our own?

To me, those two explanations really feel bizarre. You have to start from a mono world assumption to come up with that. An easy mistake to make, since personal experience is telling us all the time that there is only one world. A bit like a leaf in a binary tree: its ancestors form a line, not a tree. But Kolmogorov complexity says a literal interpretation of the equations (which means many world) is simpler than anything else we currently know about. So to hell with personal experience (which by the way is responsible for much worse whackery than mono world).

Now there is a way out: we can admit that current physics imply many worlds, but insist that real physics probably don't. Current physics are not complete after all. We may have big surprises. This argument is certainly be much saner than the Copenhagen interpretation. So much that it does lower my probability for many worlds somewhat. Just not enough to squash my confidence. :-)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_amplitude

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_space
The number one problem with passwords is that most websites are not storing them using current state-of-the-art methods that are freely available. Whether or not this is an improvement, it doesn't solve the actual problem - developers aren't going to suddenly start using this if their current method is md5(password).

That said, it does sound quite interesting from a crypto geek perspective.
Switching markup from Creole to Markdown is very good news, and the preview being back in e.g. issues comments is a good thing as well.

Though I'd prefer the preview to be live...

The readme taking center stage in the "overview" page is nice. Though getting it again in the "source" page is weird
Epic comment in the quotes:

"What is best in life? To crush the middlemen, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their lawyers."
This presentation focused on work that's more recent. Improving the scoping story with let/const is one of the things that TC39 agreed on relatively early, though:

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:let

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:const

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=harmony:block_scoped_...

Some of the new-function/lambda-syntax proposals even support Tennent's Correspondence Principle to some degree.
Don't be a Poser
Well if nothing else it gives a portable measure of ability.
Like instead of having to saying I'm an expert in Scala and the meaning of that being largely arbitrary; you've got a syllabus of stuff they claim to know (which you still need to verify it it matters).
For context, I think this is where you can see it in the photo in the OP article: http://i.minus.com/ivmqgpKATRHlj.jpg
No, Let Them Write It, I’ll Support It
Thanks so much!

The idea for creating a username is definitely spot on. I just have to find a very non-intrusive way on the UI to _suggest_ that people create a username or enter an email address.
Why wouldn't you want to provide your routing number and account number? You give them out every time you write a check. Wire transfers are probably the only good option here.
Another solution would be to employ an alogrithm that checks your solution against past solutions. It would work much like what professors employ when they submit Reports to an online repository.

If someone it stupid enough not to even change variable names then they'd be caught easily. While with Millions of solutions it would be easy to get some replication, most of the time there wouldn't be any and this is when manual intervention by a person could be triggered.

This in conjuntion with your solution would work pretty well especially if someone submitted a wrong answer for another question that they haven't seen.
I really like your project--very simple, and I believe this is something I see myself using. I think that the one major feature you may add is "private lists", it won't require that much work for you to implement, but you'll hit wider range of audience. Good Luck.
Sure, I think that's perfectly fine. Coursera needs to provide some ability (if they don't already) to allow a student to say "not taking this for credit or certificate".

But I don't think that should allow you to go and post code / answers in a public forum of sorts.
For a while I was a bit worried that GitHub had just ran away with the prize and no one else was bothering. It is pretty obvious that Google isn't interested in improving Google Code and that Sourceforge hasn't aged a day (that's not really fair, but it feels like it).

I think there is still a chance for BitBucket to make a splash, but I think its going to be hard to win anymore. That's fine, 2nd place makes a lot of money too (not counting places 1-10 for enterprise source control, which basically print money, and of which GitHub is chasing too).
I'm somewhat surprised there wasn't a mention of how valuable this would be for deaf users. For instance, they might be able to use it to synthesize voice through hand commands to talk more easily with non-deaf people (those who don't know sign-language).

If the device is made viable for gaming and mobile phone usage, there is the potential for many other users to benefit as well with other applications of the device.
Natwest's Get Cash app pulled, but NOTHING to do with frauds
Typically A/B tests are run until they reach a statistically significant result. The article doesn't include the sample size, but with a sample size as small as 500 users for each test an increase from 1.6% to 3.2% would be a change larger than 1 standard deviation, and thus can be assumed to be more than just random noise.
Putting people out of work == freeing up labor from inefficiencies. They can be productive or inefficient elsewhere, at their own expense, rather than mine.
The story behind XCOM: Enemy Unknown
For more than four years, a team of 40 or so people in Sparks secretly worked for this Tuesday.

In perhaps the biggest day in Firaxis Games' history, the design studio releases "XCOM: Enemy Unknown," a richly detailed and immersive video game that already has gotten rave reviews.

Firaxis and its parent company, 2K Games of Novato, Calif., need all the buzz they can get. Firaxis wouldn't say how much it spent developing the game, but large releases typically cost tens of millions of dollars. It's a calculated gamble that's commonplace in the video game industry, where companies pursue big-budget blockbuster hits in much the same way Hollywood bets on movies.

"You're talking about a big investment to reach a lot of people with a high end production product," said Steve Martin, Firaxis' president. "It's the biggest game Firaxis has ever produced. … It is a Herculean effort to make something this big."
Mozilla also uses a 2 server approach for passwords on their web apps but instead of splitting the password, they introduce an initial HMAC hash stage using a salt that is stored on a web app machine and then rehash that with Bcrypt for storage in a database on a separate machine.

"If an attacker steals one of our password databases, they would need to also separately attack one of our web servers to get file access in order to discover this local salt value. If they don’t manage to pull off two successful attacks, their stolen data is largely useless."

http://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2012/06/08/lets-talk-about-pa...

They have an implementation for Django (ignore the project name, it's a legacy name): https://github.com/fwenzel/django-sha2

Their implementation makes it trivially easy to expire HMAC keys and silently upgrade users to new HMAC keys.
It's "cheating" though in the sense that it's against a TOS on a website, but tons of things are against a TOS and almost no one reads them. They're pretending to be one, but Coursera is not a college, is not accredited and does not hand out degrees. This is a free online self-study course being taken by hundreds of thousands of people with varying degrees of seriousness. Some people may treat it like a college course and want the certificate (for what I am not sure), but I bet most people just want the knowledge. I signed up for a similar course once and never logged in because my schedule changed, should I get an F and have that publicized?

I have also worked through some iOS courses from Standford on iTunes U and I would not think twice about helping someone with one of the problems. Is that cheating?
Seconding Tyler's point, but with a slight amendment.

Paying cash is generally[] not better than financing through the dealership, but is much better than bringing your own financing.

[] There are a couple more factors that I haven't seen mentioned, specifically that paying cash is generally a lot faster. For the dealership, there isn't necessarily a benefit, but for the salesperson, a quick sale means they might get to slot an 'extra' sale in for that day, so it's worth it to them to play around with their commission on what they might consider a 'gimme'. If paying cash, it is best to do so on busy days so that there are other 'fish' for the salesperson to go to next. If you're the only person there, there's no real sense in urgency.
I generally version all the things, and end up with lots of small private repos. Bitbucket's pricing model is perfect for hosting that kind of thing. Really liking the new UI.
oh boy you gotta love Yahoo, even now under Mayer. Spent 10 minutes looking at the photo and realized that photo caption is layered over it... good job Yahoo team!
Too late to edit, but did a bit more research.

Turns out there's a few other academic families (that's PhD advisor lineage, not genetic) that have received >2 Nobel Prizes.

Of note there are 2 other direct Nobel-to-Nobel lineages of 3 generations:

1) I. I. Rabi -> Julian Schwinger->{Ben R. Mottelson, Sheldon Lee Glashow, Roy Glauber, Walter Kohn, Samuel Chao Chung Ting}

2) Eugene Wigner->John Bardeen->J. Robert Schrieffer

Rabi seems to be a good academic grandfather.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_genealogy_of_theoretic...
Well, Github's UI used to be much better, now it's comparable. I do wonder why Bitbucket insists on having "overview" as the standard page to go to when visiting a repository, making Code the default would be a better idea IMHO. Also because more people use Github, more people are likely to start using it so they can fork their favorite projects
Most of my old uni assignments are public because i use free code repos for them.

Heck, my thesis latex files are still in my public Google code repository.

The punishment should be on people that copy not who have content publicly available.
I would not list it under "Education" alongside a formal degree. However, I might mention it in a cover letter to demonstrate passion and internal motivation for a given subject.

While I'm quick to condemn certification, I can see the other side of this argument as well. To a lot of people, Coursera represents the opportunity to overhaul a broken education system. In order for true change, Coursera must not only demonstrate that it can educate people, but that it can do so credibly and consistently.
Chartio is hiring Marketing and Sales reps.
Sigh You're absolutely right. I guess, if there is such a niche, which remains to be seen, I maybe could limit the number of lists they can have before upgrading to premium?!

If anyone has ideas, I'm more than willing to listen.
Google is working on a new Google Code overhaul which is supposed to be quite different.
Notes on my work at Twitter (Jack Dorsey)
To the bitbucket team:

Please keep on doing what you are doing. Your service and this new redesign is awesome, and my team and myself wouldn't be where we are without you.

We're a small team of young developers working on a startup for the past few months. We haven't launched yet so we're obviously not profitable, but the fact that you've enabled us to make it as far as we have also ensures that when we are in a position to pay for software development tools they will come from a brand we know, trust, and love: Atlassian.

Also, you should update the Atlassian Store with t-shirts and other swag.

Once again, great job, thank you, and keep on keepin' on.
Thanks for the suggestion! I'll check 'em out. I was secretly hoping that there was some awesome YC-backed start-up that's nailing this problem that I'd missed..but this looks like it may be helpful.
So, you're going to use it but adding a private list feature would make it even more useful to you?!

Nice, thanks so much!
We use beanstalk at work. Gets the job done, but not nearly as nice as Github or Bitbucket, and there are times page loads are pretty slow.
So far, I've been enjoying reading these questions. However, I think that the format prevents using them to answer what might be a more interesting question - how long would it take someone with a different (non-CS) academic background to answer the question (with understanding, obviously, not through cut and paste). In other words, rather than asking whether someone knows the answer, ask how well prepared they are to research and understand the question.
David Cross and Amber Tamblyn Married
How would that work, exactly? Would you set up a contract whereby you can buy hard drives according to a price schedule which decreases according to a set schedule, where that price decrease has you paying a bit more than the expected market price, but is guaranteed and thus protects you from increases?
This is great. I continue to use bitbucket for all of my personal repos since they provide unlimited private repos for free. I would use github for my private repos but I have lot's of small repos that make private github cost prohibitive.
That in general, we might be better off for it?

That said, it really has no bearing on this discussion. Currently companies do things like destroy perfectly good grains in an effort to prevent the price from dropping due to over-supply. Why? Because it costs money to store, so better to just destroy it. If we come up short later, then it's even more beneficial to the company because the price actually goes up!

That's not even touching the issue of Africa, where most 'aide' that is sent never makes it to the starving people due to political turmoil / warlords / etc.
The fault in the first stage led directly to rocket being in wrong place, too close to ISS, thus prohibited from firing.
If you read that NYT article just yesterday on the enormous drag and waste caused by the current state of software patents, you'd sing a different tune. The log line is "software companies now spend more on patents than on R & D".

These particular incentives are warping the IP system out of control. They have huge downsides and now little upside (unless you hit the patent jackpot yourself and are willing to go sleazy).

It need not destroy all incentives to hurt innovation.
Because there are places where that's all it takes to spend money. I trust our clients..but you never know..especially when dealing with an international client you've never met.
Oh, then perhaps it should have linked to a cached page. Now it's just confusing...
What employer takes Coursera classes seriously?
dont you love that company... they offer a farmer genetically polluted product that even bugs die of eating (and somehow magically they wont affect human organism, now and in 40 years of constant eating), farmer says "no thank you", then they buy a land around his, put their seeds on, wind blows them on the farmer land, then they sue him for stealing their seeds. By the time the case is closed, the farmer is bankrupt and in $XXX,000 debt.

Its literally like someone broke into your house, raped and killed your daughter and in defense you knocked them off by smashing their head. Then you are being thrown into jail because you hurt that perpetrator and they go free because only you could technically prove they did the crime.
I host all of my private stuff on Bitbucket. I love this new redesign. Its a good way to differentiate themselves from github.
We certainly appreciate that, and I personally remember the days of being a small startup. You're in for a wild ride, enjoy it! :)
Would love to use them. But they don't support everywhere we need to be.
From my understanding, if you purchase Monsanto seeds you explicitly agree to not reuse seed from your crop. You have to purchase new seed from Monsanto for the next crop. Which I don't feel I necessarily disagree with that practice. You made the deal so you have to abide by it.

The problem is that Monsanto claims to own the rights to all resulting seeds from their original, forever into the future. This includes cross pollination. So they want farmers who never agreed to use their seed in their crops to pay up because nature does its thing and everyone's crop ends up with characteristics of Monsanto's seed.

The solution is for every farmer to pay Monsanto or ban nature.
So just don't comment or vote. If everyone feels the same, the post won't even make it on to the front page. The negativity isn't called for!

If the OP wants to try and make a business from it, let them. If it turns a profit, fantastic. If it doesn't, what a great experience - and maybe next time they'll have the experience and drive to make something you are interested in :-)
Awesome, I think this just heavily strengthened the future of Mercurial. I'm not trying to start any version control wars here, but personally, I found Mercurial to be the most "intuitive" approach (unlike Git/SVN, but again, that's my opinion).

I've extensively used Bitbucket in the past, especially for personal projects. I love what I see here, and will continue to use the service as such. Long live Bitbucket! :)
I'm using both. GitHub and BitBucket. But actually I like BitBuckets UI more. For me it is a little bit more intuitiv.
If people sign up for a course like this and then turn in work they copied from the Internet, I definitely don't want to hire them. Even if they weren't after the certificate. That's like cheating at solitaire. It's just sad.

Also, do you have any evidence that the no-cheating, no-publishing-homework policy is buried in a TOS? If Coursera hasn't made it obvious enough, then sure, people could have made a mistake. But Odersky's a smart guy so his reaction makes me imagine he made the requirement obvious.
The Blob (1958) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051418/
Bcrypt slows down a brute force attack considerably, but cannot prevent one. If your password is one of the top N passwords in use, then a determined attacker can still break it. For example, if you set your work factor such that it takes 1 second to verify a password using bcrypt on login to your server, then if your password is in a dictionary of the top 100k passwords, an attacker could get to it within (about) a day using equivalent hardware. Using more specialized (or just more) hardware of course drives it further.
Have an iPhone? Love the Apple II? Have I got a text tone for you.
This reminds me that the HN spoof page a few days back really needed a "NASA: Curiosity moves three inches to the left" item.